Status Updates From An Introduction to Mathemat...

In modern civilized life, with its artificial light, these phases are of slight importance, but in ancient times, in climates where the days are burning and the skies clear, human life was apparently largely influenced by the existence of moonlight.

Now, the essence of coordinate geometry is the identification of the algebraic correlation with the geometrical locus.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

I have been really busy so far and made little progress, but I did review certain sections.

From the beginning till now the book has been very captivating.

".... in the West electrical and magnetic phenomena were studied by men who were dominated by abstract theoretic interests."

I suppose this is true, in most part of the world theoretical pursuant aren't as intense.

The idea of the undetermined "variable" as occurring in the use of "some" or "any" is the really important one in mathematics; that of the "unknown" in an equation, which is to be solved as quickly as possible, is only of subordinate use, though of course it is very important.


:thinking:
He wrote something agreeable then he said it's a mistake. I am swooned.

I cannot believe I am typing these words right now, but this book has been way easier than I expected so far. As my mathematical knowledge is nearly non-existent, I never expect a book to be not-hard, let alone easy. But
something still makes me think I won't be able to finish the book.

"No more impressive warning can be given to those who would confine knowledge and research to what is apparently useful, than the reflection that conic sections were studied for eighteen hundred years merely as an abstract science... [before] they were found to be the necessary key with which to attain the knowledge of one of the most important laws of nature."